Technical Support

If you have questions about using the search function of the Ohio Public Notices website, please see the information below.

For technical questions about uploading your newspaper notices to the website or fixing a smart search problem, please contact Jason Sanford at the Ohio Newspaper Association at jsanford@ohionews.org or 614-486-6677, ext. 1014.

Search Tips:

Quick Search
The simplest search is a one-word or an exact-match search. For example, if you were searching for Public Notices that had to do with an election, you could simply type the word "election" into the Search textbox. The results will list Public Notices, from all publications, that contain the word "election", anywhere within the text. It should be noted that searches are never case-sensitive, so there is no need to be concerned whether or not it is most appropriate to use capital or lowercase letters.

Advanced Search

Searching Phrases
Searching phrases is one way to narrow the results shown. For example, let’s assume you only want to see results that contain a specific phrase containing the word election, such as 2010 General Election. In order to search for that specific phrase, you must check the EXACT PHRASE function and enter "2010 General Election" in the Search textbox.

Searching Multiple Words
Searches do not have to be simple keywords or complete phrases. You may search for the presence of multiple words, or even multiple phrases occurring in a Public Notice by using the ANY WORD function. In this example, we are trying to find notices that contain the number 2010, and the word election anywhere in the Public Notices.

The text entered in the Search textbox would be 2010 Election, select the ANY WORD function and click GO. This will give you all the Public Notices for every publication containing ANY of the words above.

Excluding Words
Another helpful tip in searching is using the EXCLUDING function. For example, if you want to search for the words "Grace Period" but you already know you do not want results about "SB 2925" then you can do a search similar to this: "Grace Period" EXCLUDING "SB 2925", this can be useful in weeding out results that you know you do not want to see.

Refine by Publication
It may be helpful for you to search for Public Notices originated by only one or a select few publications within a certain county or city narrowing your results even further. This may be accomplished by simply selecting the individual publication(s), county(s) or city(s) in the lists to narrow your Public Notice results.

Refine by Date
To narrow your search results by the corresponding publication date, simply refine your search by selecting one the following options: In the last X Days (X=Number of days before today’s date), OR past Y weeks (Y=Number of weeks before today’s date), OR Z months (Z=number of months before today’s date). To specify an exact date of publication for your notices, or a simple date range click the DATE RANGE function and select your corresponding dates.

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Photo of Ohio Statehouse stairwell copyright by and used with the permission of Jordan Steele.